Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Saturday, November 25, 2017

John Boulting | Brighton Rock

In
John Boulting’s 1947 film, Brighton Rock,
Richard Attenborough—who died this year at the age of 90—plays a steely faced
teenager named Pinkie, who heads a small Brighton gang of older men. His
razor-carrying friends may be brutal, but the Catholic-born boy is by far the more
of an outright psychotic personality. Indeed the movie opens with Pinkie and
his gang honing in the reporter Fred Hale (Alan Wheatley), who they hold
responsible for their gang-leader’s, a man named Kite, death.

Terrified by their knowledge of his
whereabouts, Hale is in town to publicize his book by placing small placards
around Brighton with the name “Kolley Kibber.” Those who discover them are
awarded a small amount of money if they redeem them, while anyone who figures
out who Kolley Kibber really is will receive a larger cash award—Hale ceases
the activity seeking out the company of women, at first a loud-voiced patron of
the bar, Ida (Hermione Baddeley), who acts in a local Pierrot-costumed
performance company, and later with a woman on the beach, who he asks to
accompany him for the entire day so that he might be protected from the gang’s
attack.

When his pick-up leaves him alone for a
short bathroom break, the gang corners him, as Hale attempts to quite spectacularly
race off. Finally caught, he is taken to a Brighton pier amusement ride, and is
later discovered drowned. The police, despite Ida’s testimony that Hale had
seemed frightened and troubled during their short meeting, determine the
reporter’s death to have been a suicide. And like a somewhat blowsy Miss
Marple, she proceeds to investigate what she believes to have been a murder.

Meanwhile, Pinkie, in order to avoid
suspicion, has one of his men, Spicer, continue to distribute the “Kolley
Kibber” placards around town to make it appear that Hale had simply continued
to pursue his normal activities. But one of them, hidden under a restaurant
tablecloth, troubles him since he is afraid that the waitress, an innocent,
overly trusting girl named Rose (Carol Marsh) will realize it was left by
Spicer rather than Hale. When he goes to retrieve it, he realizes that Rose,
having removed the tablecloth, has already come to that conclusion, since she
is especially good at recognizing faces. Determined to quiet her, Pinkie makes
a date with her at the pier, and woes her, later determining to marry her to
prevent her from testifying.

Another wrinkle in Pinkie’s increasingly claustrophobic
life occurs when a rival, more powerful gang, challenges his territory,
slashing his face (in the US the film was re-titled Young Scarface) and attempting to kill him and Spicer, whom Pinkie
has intentionally brought to the racetrack for the Colleoni gang to kill.

Both survive, but Pinkie finally does in
his fellow gang partner by pushing him through a high stair banister.

Further complications arise when Ida
tracks down Rose, telling her who Pinkie really is and explaining that the
young girl herself is in danger. Now desperately in love with Pinkie, Rose
refuses to be dissuaded. And, soon after, the two are married, with Pinkie now
planning to plot a double-suicide with the thoroughly trusting girl so they
might be together forever.

Ida, who now knows the whole truth
finally convinces the authorities to believe her, leads them to the pier where
Rose, despite her religious reticence, is about to shoot herself, believing
that he will soon follow her. She is saved just in time as the police rush in,
she impulsively throwing the weapon into the water, Pinkie returning to
question her about the gun, and, upon seeing the police, tries to make a run
for it, accidentally falling into the sea to his death.

Earlier in the story, Pinkie has made a
store-bought recording in which he, so Rose believes, has testified to his love
for her, while actually saying: "What you want me to say is I love you.
Well here is the truth. I hate you, you little slut. You make me sick." In
Graham Greene’s original novel, Rose, who had no phonograph, finally hears the
truth after Pinkie’s death. But British censor’s made the writers change the
film’s ending, with, the final recording, which Pinkie has purposely scratched,
repeating only the words “I love you,” and the naive girl still deluded. In
some ways, it helped make the film far more cynical: those who want to believe
can never not.

For my taste, Greene’s and Terence
Rattigan’s screenplay (I’ve never been a Rattigan admirer; I’ve always loved
the fact that Shelagh Delaney wrote her A
Taste of Honey in response to a mediocre Rattigan melodrama) with its
rather outlandish plot is more than a little fussy and, at moments, quite inexplicable.
Why do the police think Hale’s death was a sudden suicide and how Ida so
quickly and alertly stumbles upon the truth are both rather preposterous propositions.
The “Kolley Kibber” publicity stunt seems absolutely absurd, seemingly introduced
into the story simply to track the movements of Fred Hale. And the work never
does explain how Hale might have been responsible for the death of former gang
leader Kite. Or, for that matter, does the film even hint at how the young
teenage boy (Attenborough was only 23 at the time of this performance) has so
quickly risen in the gangland ranks? although we suspect it might have
something to do his simple cruelty. How he got that way we can never know,
except that Greene often conceived of a world in terms of goodness and evil,
and Pinkie is most certainly a vision of the devil himself. As David Gritten
pointed out in a review in The Telegraph,
“Even his phone number contains a "666."

Yet the film does have several
spectacular scenes, particularly the fun-house ride just prior to Hale’s
death—which quite clearly prefigures Hitchcock’s funhouse scene in Strangers on a Train just before that film’s
equally psychotic figure’s murder of Guy Haines’ nasty wife, Miriam. The razor
fight at the racetrack is almost as good as the far-longer knife battle in West Side Story, and Baddeley’s visit to
Pinkie’s crooked lawyer is comically memorable; this man recognizes that he is
already in hell. Attenborough is quite convincing as the fallen angel with
nowhere to go but straight into the abyss his religion has promised. And I
suppose that the reviewer for Time Out
is correct in suggesting Brighton Rock is
“the nearest thing to a British noir thriller—although
I might argue that British director Hitchcock created a better work in The Wrong Man (even if it was an
American-produced film), and American director’s Jules Dassin’s British
produced Night and the City is
another noir contender. But, ultimately, I might also agree with Dilys Powell’s
jibe: “It [Brighton Rock] proceeds
with the efficiency, the precision and the anxiety to please of a circular saw.”